Some Valley neighborhoods are having a hard time attracting the right businesses, but community groups and commercial real estate brokers are working to change that.

Homes and businesses in the Sunnyslope community, located near Central and Dunlap avenues in Phoenix, rely on each other for success, said Joel McCabe, director of Desert Mission Neighborhood Renewal, an affiliate of the John C. Lincoln Health Network.

McCabe and Desert Mission Neighborhood Renewal have led the Hatcher Road Improvement Committee in revitalizing that area in the Sunnyslope community, where storefronts skirt neighborhoods and schools.

The project was created by the Sunnyslope Business Coalition — a group of community activists and nonprofit leaders, including the Kiwanis Club and the Sunnyslope Village Alliance — to make the area more pedestrian- and business-friendly.

“The community came together and decided this is a really important commercial corridor,” McCabe said of the storefronts along Hatcher Road, just north of Dunlap. “We’ve had different Realtors that have worked with us, and that’s a critical piece of encouraging new businesses, increasing traffi c and helping the current businesses.”

A marketing challenge

Like many other communities, Sunnyslope saw an exodus of retail businesses in 2010, and the area has not regained much ground in retail occupancy this year, according to data from Cassidy Turley BRE Commercial.

The average age of properties in the area is almost 40 years. Two major businesses, OfficeMax and Food City, left the Sunnyslope Village Center on the southeast corner of Central and Dunlap a few years after it opened in 2000. Ross Dress for Less moved into OfficeMax’s empty space and now anchors the center along with a Dollar Tree store, but the former Food City space remains empty.

Jim Mapstead, former president of Sunnyslope Village Alliance, a nonprofi t group working to revitalize the community, said the center is in need of another grocery store.

“We would love to see Food City come back here, because with the predominantly Hispanic population, that place was always busy,” he said.

For brokers, this can create a marketing challenge. Viable tenants are at a premium, and deflated rental prices have business owners looking at locations that might have been out of their price range during a normal economy, said Pete Bolton, managing director at Grubb & Ellis Phoenix.

“If you can get a better location for basically the right amount of money, you’re going to jump,” he said. “That’s what’s been happening for some time, and the (lowest-price properties) are going to suffer for a while.”

He said brokers go to neighborhood and chamber of commerce meetings to fi nd out what incentives as lower rental rates or new zoning rules that allow shared parking among tenants; then they distribute that information to clients and other brokers. Finding tenants with financial backing also is a challenge.

“Some of this stuff, plain and simple, is just not going to fill up for a long time,” Bolton said. It’s not just the older neighborhoods that are hard to fill. Some of the largest vacancies are in the suburbs — notably in the outskirts of Chandler, where new construction was at its height during the economic boom.

Cassidy Turley BRE’s 2010 market report shows South Phoenix had a commercial vacancy rate of about 9.5 percent, compared with 11.2 percent for Chandler/ Gilbert and 15.7 percent in Mesa.

“There wasn’t a lot of new construction in South Phoenix right before the economy went south,” said Courtney Auther Van Loo, senior associate at Cassidy Turley’s retail group.

Those new properties were tough to fi ll when economic conditions tanked, he added. “There’s a handful of shopping centers, but not as (many) as in the East Valley, Chandler and Gilbert.”

Community involvement, however, can help make properties more marketable, said Brian Kocour, Cassidy Turley’s retail group vice president.

“Brokers and business development people need to engage, just collectively coming together and talking,” Kocour said. “If you don’t talk about it, something gets overlooked.”

Brainstorming and cooperation

Auther said any type of involvement can help revitalize a community.

“It’s a matter of communities and cities getting together and explaining where these areas are, and speaking with brokers with properties in that area,” she said.

“And landlords need to help. There might be tenants, but they’re not willing to lower rents or take risk to get tenants.”

One example of a community’s brainstorming and cooperation with local brokers is the Discovery Triangle, which encompasses the area bounded by downtown Phoenix, Arizona State University’s main campus in Tempe, and Papago Park.

CB Richard Ellis helped create a database of all commercial properties within the area for Discovery Triangle Development Corp., a public-private partnership whose goal is to revitalize that region. It includes detailed information on each property, including its history and uses.

Don Keuth, CEO of the organization, said CBRE has been an integral part of the group’s efforts.

“Through this elaborate database, when people are looking for places we can very quickly fnd out if there’s a space in the triangle that suits their needs,” he said.

Bringing new businesses to the area — especially young entrepreneurs looking for low rents for their startups — will create jobs, which is the largest component of revitalization efforts.

“We ought to think about it more in terms of areas of great potential and looking at how to turn that area into something better,”

Keuth said. “We have to make sure we understand that, yeah, it’s got a few warts, but what the heck — those are opportunities.”

In Sunnyslope, the empty storefronts have a negative impact on the community, McCabe said, and the focus needs to be on the positive aspects of the area to help make improvements.

So far, Desert Mission Neighborhood Renewal has succeeded in adopting the Hatcher Road Overlay District, which changed some zoning restrictions along Hatcher to encourage more diverse development of businesses and off-street and shared parking; increased the number of streetlights; and distributed business resource kits.

“You continue to work in the area, promote the positive, support existing businesses and bring new businesses in,”

McCabe said. “Sunnyslope’s very unique in having a long history of being involved, and taking responsibility and pride in the community, and trying to solve its issues.”